This morning we boarded a train from Prague, 2 hours to the small town of Pilsen (Plzen). The allure of this small town is it's claim to fame of being the first place to brew botom fermented amber lager. Firstly, we visited the quirky little Brewery Museum that details the history of beer making in Pilsen from the 1300's when everyone in the town had a license to brew and a large amount of beer had to be poured into the town square becasue it was so bad that it was a health hazard. With our ticket we also got a token for a free beer from a local pub so naturally after the museum we had a sample of Pilsen Urquell, Plzen's native beer. Lunch was delicous goulash and bread dumplings for Brendan and potato dumplings stuff with pork for Mish. Totally satisfied, we visited the Pilsen Historical Underground which is a 17km network of tunnels under the Old Town that was used over the centuries for cellars, town defence and communication in times of siege. Last on our list for todays day trip was a tour of the Pilsener Urquell Brewery.

The tour was really good and took us into the bottling plant where we got to see beer being bottled and canned, labelled and quality checked. It was amazing to see these machines work with such precision. We also when underground into the cellars where they used to store the beer and got to sample some ale inside the cellar, straight from the barrel. we got another token for a free beer at the end of this tour but only had 15 minutes before our train back to Prague departed the station. The beer we were given was the best beer Michelle has ever tasted and is pretty high on Brendan's list too (Master's Dark) so it was a real shame to have to skull it. Thankfully we did make our train with moments to spare. When we returned to Prague we met up with Simon, Katy and Elliot, who had just arrived in town, for for a street food dinner and some beers back at our appartment. We also cooked up some fruit dumplings for dessert which were lovely.